In honor of Grandmom Nellie, I sometimes eat ice cream for breakfast and potato pancakes for dinner. When confronted with a minor ache or pain, I consider a “Listerine soak”, her tried-and-true miracle elixir for whatever was ailing her. At 80, she broke her arm and poured the cure-all down into the white plaster cast. The doctor was not amused.
I learned a lot from Grandmom, but her death has been the toughest lesson. She would be displeased with me now as she was whenever we talked of aging, death and dying. She would say to me as she did in months before she passed, “Don’t cry. This is life. People die.”
She had no way of knowing an aneurysm would block her brain, knock her to her knees, and take her from the world. When she mentioned death to me one sunny afternoon I said, “Grandmom, I need more time. Just one more year, one more summer at the shore, just one more birth.”
But there are never enough days. 
Grandmom Nellie’s eyes grew wide and her lips curled into a smile whenever she told and retold a story from “the old days”. I keep those stories close to me now--the one about the night she ditched her drunken blind date at the cemetery, or the time she argued with her husband and threw his keys into the snowy parking lot, or the day she mistakenly tried to pick up that married guy in Las Vegas. (She was, after all, a widow in her eighties then.) There was the story of the time after a disagreement with Pop-Pop, she jumped in his car and drove away, never mind the fact that she had never learned to drive. 
She often told the tales of survival as a teen in a strange city. At sixteen, she escaped from a coal-mining town in eastern Pennsylvania to Philadelphia during Prohibition. This meant fending off advances from an aggressive boss at the factory where she worked or sneaking out the back of a speakeasy during a bust while a sympathetic police officer looked the other way.
	As a young married woman, she raised two children when her husband enlisted in World War II. In later years, she studied and successfully invested in the stock market even though she never graduated from eleventh grade. 
Grandmom Nellie told you what was on her mind in no uncertain terms and she always did what she wanted. “Girl, you go out and get what you want—just take it. Don’t be afraid. Have no regrets,” she said as I sat in her kitchen one night.
	“But Grandmom, I am a worrier. What if…” I replied.
“Pfft.” Her hand waved in front of her face. “Why worry? None of it matters when you are 83. Just live. I always managed to have a good time. When you are old you realize what a good life you’ve had. Don’t waste your time worrying.”